Clamshell Update

This was my first month working on the clamshells and here's my progress!

I have finished appliqueing 5 of the clamshell diamonds, 2 more of the diamonds are glue basted and another 2 more ready to be glue basted. As you can see, this is going to be a very bright quilt! I may name this quilt "Myriad Gardens" so I'm trying to think of each diamond as a garden. A little blue for water perhaps in the form of a fountain, bird bath or pond, some brown and green for trees, shrubs and grasses and some color for flowers. Some of the gardens have more attitude than others!

Sometimes its been difficult to use both my older fabrics and the contemporary fabrics. They might look OK together but don't have the ZING I think is needed. I'll soon need to cut more clamshells and am seeing which fabrics work better than others in this quilt.

This past weekend, my husband and I took a quick trip to Illinois to see his family. I was hoping to get more of the handwork done in the car but I quickly discovered how difficult it is to make tiny stitches in traffic! Threading a needle was a challenge too so I was only able to work on it during the evenings. I'm happy with my progress though and hope to finish or come close to finishing the full diamonds during November. Next will be the half diamonds and corners but at this point, I'm trying not to think about how much handwork is left to do!

A clamming I will go!

I'm not even sure where or when I purchased Kaffe Fassett's Museum Quilts book but I'm sure I bought it because of the colors of the quilt on the front cover! This has been one of those quilts that will not go away and I've finally given in. I'm going to make it or maybe I should say, try to make it! He calls this a "challenging quilt" which should tell me something, shouldn't it?!?

My version will be made from both my stash of the past 30 years and from contemporary fabrics some of which are Kaffe Fassett fabrics. When I first saw his fabrics, I thought they were so ugly! I was especially turned off by the cabbage and roses fabric. Ugh. BTW, fat quarters of both the yellow and purple color ways of this fabric are now in my posession. I've decided I like the intensity of the colors. I'm not sure yet how well they will play with the dusty rose and sunflower fabrics from my crafting days!

I've been busy cutting out clamshells and preparing them for putting together the diamonds. Because I took the "Process Pledge", I've decided to take you along on this journey so my next post will show you how I've been preparing the clamshells.

I've made over 700 of them so far so please (!) don't tell me I've done it wrong! I still need to make around 500 more but I've decided to start putting together the diamonds first. Does the amount of time spent on making something with that many pieces scare you? I found this quote on Journey of a Quilter's blog.

"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish

something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will

pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to

the best possible use."

- Earl Nightingale

To help keep me motivated and encouraged, I've joined the Clamshell Club a group of bloggers working on clamshell projects! If you'd like to see our progress, click on the button in the upper right hand column. Click again on the end of the month updates (top of the page) to see a list of bloggers who are sharing what they've accomplished on their projects.

Spiderweb Selvage Quilt update - I've found some wider bright selvages so I can make more blocks! I'd really like to finish this top before Christmas.